Donald Beckford said Boston did a poor job of clearing snow in Dorchester.

By Gal Tziperman Lotan
Globe Correspondent
February 16, 2013

Just a week after a snowstorm knocked out power to the Quarterdeck Restaurant in Falmouth and a travel ban left the eatery closed for two weekend nights, hostess Carol Keating Cole said she wasn’t too worried about another storm.

“Another 10 inches — huh, well,” she said, “I think if we can open our doors, we will. . . . Honestly, people on Cape Cod are resilient.”

About 8 to 10 inches of snow were expected to fall Sunday on Cape Cod and parts of the South Shore, starting shortly after midnight, with gusts of wind at 50 miles per hour, said Alan Dunham, a National Weather Service meteorologist. The region was battered by long power outages during last weekend’s storm.

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Officials from NStar, which had 350,000 customers without electricity last week, many of them on the Cape and South Shore, planned to have extra crews available.

Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe

Caitlin Minnich moved to an apartment on Brook Avenue in Dorchester amid snow flurries on Saturday.

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“We’ll be staffing our service center throughout the storm to make sure our communities are well served,” said NStar spokeswoman Annemarie Walsh. “We’re prepared.”

About 6 to 8 inches of snow were expected in the Boston area and North Shore on Sunday, along with wind gusts of 40 to 45 miles per hour, Dunham said.

A National Grid spokeswoman said the utility is not expecting storm-related damages as severe as last weekend, when 251,000 customers lost power.

The company has customers in the southeastern part of the state, but not on Cape Cod.

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Still, National Grid planned to have extra crews on hand and contractors standing by on Sunday, said spokeswoman Debbie Drew.

“We’re keeping a close eye on the South Shore and the southeastern area of the state because that’s where the strongest wind gusts are expected,” she said.

Donald Beckford of Milton, who visits in
Dorchester daily, said the streets near Uphams Corner were messy. Some were reduced to one narrow lane with heaps of snow on either side.

“These were really bad,” he said, gesturing toward Brook Avenue and West Cottage Street. “There was nowhere to park for days.”

Beckford, 24, said the storm was the worst he could remember.

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“It was the worst for me,” he said. “The worst one where I’ve been able to drive. All the other ones, I was a kid, so you could just enjoy it.”

Caitlin Minnich, 33, spent Saturday unpacking a truck on Brook Avenue, where she was moving from Jamaica Plain. Though there were some flakes in the air as Minnich and her friends hauled her belongings into the house, none stuck — a welcome difference from last weekend.

“My little street in JP had like, 3 feet of snow until Monday night,” she said.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s office issued a weather advisory Saturday night asking residents to be cautious, but did not declare a snow emergency or parking ban.

“I’m asking residents to use common sense, and stay off the roads while snowfall is heaviest tomorrow,” Menino said in a statement.

The public works department pretreated roads with salt and brine, and the mayor’s hot line, 617-635-4500, will have extra staff Sunday, said Emilee Ellison, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office.

Some communities south of Boston, including Brockton and New Bedford, issued parking bans.

The state Highway Division had 132 employees on the roads Saturday morning, pretreating highways with a liquid deicer meant to slow accumulation and make for easy plowing, Department of Transportation spokesman Michael Verseckes said.

That’s a far cry from the more than 3,600 snowplows, front loaders, and other pieces of equipment deployed near the height of last weekend’s storm, he said.

“We’re not expecting a significant storm event, but in any case, we’ll be out there,” Verseckes said.

Snow should taper off by Sunday night, giving way to a cold night with lows in the teens, then a partly sunny and breezy Monday with highs in the low 30s, said dunham, the meteorologist.

No raindrops or snowflakes are expected through Friday, but it will be far from T-shirt weather, with high temperatures expected to stay in the 30s, Dunham said.

“Hope springs eternal,” Dunham said, “but you’re in New England, and it is still February.”